Department Meeting Agenda: February 13, 2008
How does understanding the past help
us to understand the present?
Overview: The following agenda is an outline. The time frames are goals, but may take more time as needed. It is essential that we design the Grade-Span Thematic Essential Questions (GSTEQ) first. Once these are finished and agreed upon, we can move to create common assessments for the GSTEQ’s. Once the common assessment criteria are agreed upon, we can move to fill in the sub-themes/concept/content needed to teach these GSTEQ’s.
* Mike came up with a great idea to design a common assessment modeled on the National History Day format (not the actual competition). This assessment would use the differentiation, research, steps, etc. that NHD follows overall, but would be based on our GSTEQ’s. They would also be tiered (Blooms or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge) for each grade level. We need to consider this as a department.
The Results:
The Grade-Span Essential Thematic Questions (Finished Version):
Students from 6th through 8th grade will be asked to demonstrate their ability to answer these questions using the content covered in their respective Social Studies classes.
Overarching Grade-Span Thematic Essential Question:
How does understanding the past help us to
understand the present?
1. Why do people live and move where they do? (Geography & Human Migration)
2. Why do people live the way they do? (Culture)
3. How are human societies organized? (Civics, Government)
4. How does technology affect people's lives? (Technology, Innovation)
5. How has conflict and cooperation shaped human history? (Warfare, World Politics)
6. How has the quest for resources affected human history? (Economics)
7. How do we know what we know about human history? (Historiography, Social Sciences)
8. Why do civilizations rise and decline? (Civilization defined and more)
Yearly Common Assessments will be use a National History Day format/model to answer the above questions. (This needs to be developed yet)